There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
Having been a fellow student with Prince Hamlet at Wittenberg University, the “philosophy” Horatio studied would most likely have been natural philosophy, the precursor to what would later become natural history and later still our modern science. Much has been discovered since those days, but much has also been lost.
In our quest to become ever more accurate, dividing and sub-dividing the fields in search of irrefutable discrete bits of knowledge, we sometimes lose sight of the larger, albeit less well-defined view of the whole. We also even occasionally forget why we began our enquiries in the first place.
So who am I? As I like to say – only partly in jest – I’m a bookish, tweedy, beardy, bespectacled old gent who has been found out standing in many fields and plays well with otters. To say that I’m an avid reader would be to understate the matter. I’m also an enthusiastic student of natural history in the classic sense. Whether it flies, runs, creeps, or swims, photosynthesizes or mineralizes, or lithifies, chances are I’ll find it not only interesting but worth the time to study both afield and in the library.
While I’m university educated with a pair of graduate degrees in my past, I’m a life-long autodidact and self-taught in a variety of subjects across the sciences and humanities. I have particular interests, of course, amongst which are the history of natural philosophy (stretching all the way back to ancient Greece) and natural history, and the reflection of these subjects in the arts, particularly literature.